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		<title>To lie to medical professionals &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/03-March/28.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>To lie to medical professionals</h1>
			<p>Day 00387: <time>Monday, 2016 March 28</time></p>
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<p>
	I received a letter from one of my credit unions today saying that if I got an automobile insurgence quote, they would ship me a gratis umbrella.
	In the fine print, they said that the offer is only valid if I get the quote over the telephone.
	That&apos;s just moronic.
	There&apos;s no valid reason to require that a quote be obtained over the telephone.
</p>
<p>
	I want to speak with the people at the dental office, and I think I may have somehow looked up the wrong dental office yesterday.
	I swear that the address I saw was on Virginia avenue, but the only dental offices there are with other providers.
	Luckily, a local office was available, and perhaps it was even slightly closer than the office that I thought was the right one; it was just about half a block off Virginia Avenue, on Broadway.
	They said that it was in fact possible for me to set up an appointment at the local office instead of the distant one.
	But while emergency appointments are available for people with a pain of at least a six, ostensibly on a scale of zero to ten, as far as regular appointments, the soonest that they can see me is May 23.
	I&apos;m wasn&apos;t even sure that I&apos;ll be in the city anymore in May, so I didn&apos;t set up the appointment.
	I later spoke with my mother about this, and she told me to lie about the pain, saying that it was of level nine and that the pain is nearly unbearable.
	This seems like a very bad idea.
	Even ignoring the fact that this would be lying, it misinforms the medical professionals that are performing work on my body.
	If they think that things are worse than they are, yes, they&apos;ll see me sooner, but they will also take more drastic action or potentially even the wrong action.
	Lying to medical professionals just isn&apos;t safe.
	I suppose I&apos;ll walk to the distant office tomorrow and try to make an appointment there to see if I can get a sooner appointment.
	If I can get a sooner appointment, even if it&apos;s at the more distant office, maybe that will appease my mother.
	If a sooner appointment isn&apos;t available at the other office, maybe I&apos;ll suck it up and tell her about my fears with lying to the dental people.
	Alternatively, maybe I&apos;ll just schedule the May 23 appointment if I can&apos;t get a sooner one at the other office.
	If I have to cancel it, I have to cancel it.
</p>
<p>
	I worked on <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d">include.d</a> a bit, but I quickly hit a snag: <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> traits can&apos;t define class constants.
	This throws a wrench in my usual method of setting exception codes.
	For the built-in exception classes, exception codes are integers.
	To make such numeric information meaningful, I set up class constants to compare the exception codes to.
	That means to see if an exception was caused by a particular exception-throwing case, you can compare the exception code to the relevant constant.
	This doesn&apos;t help if you don&apos;t have any guesses as to where the exception came from, but you usually do have a pretty good idea of what could do the throwing based on what code you wrote and/or interfaced with, and this is the closest that I can get to meaningful exception codes in the default exception classes.
	Now I&apos;m faced with several options, assuming that i can&apos;t come up with any better ones.
	I could have the class that uses the trait define the constants, but that would mean that each class that implements the trait would have its own set of constants to check against.
	You wouldn&apos;t have a generic way to check to see if the exception was thrown by a particular method; instead, you&apos;d be checking to see if it was thrown by the combination of the method itself and the class that used the trait.
	I could set this up as static functions that return the values that would have otherwise been constant values, but that seems hacky.
	I could define a constant array outside of a class that is used strictly to hold the constant values that would otherwise be stored in trait constants, but that presents a couple issues.
	First, it doesn&apos;t take care of the constants used to provide access to the value that the <code>__FILE__</code> keyword references from within the trait&apos;s file.
	Second, it causes all exception-throwing cases in which this external constant is referenced to be fatal if the exception&apos;s file has not been <code>require</code>d.
	Then again, this may be fine.
	Code that isn&apos;t ready to deal with these potential exception cases by including the constant is probably not wrapped in a <code>try</code> block.
	Exceptions should be fatal when unexpected.
	Still, it seems messy, as you may try to catch anything that can possibly be thrown, only to have the undefined constant error kill your code.
	Perhaps I just shouldn&apos;t use an exception code or should use a code that&apos;s arbitrary but easy to calculate.
	I did some experimenting and found that I can cram six characters into a thirty-two bit integer if I use a forty-character alphabet.
	It&apos;s also worth noting that I still can only cram six character into the integer if I use a twenty-six character alphabet.
	In fact, in order to cram in a seventh character, I have to drop to a twenty-three character alphabet.
	If I go with this method, which is more helpful, one extra character in length or seventeen extra characters in the character set?
</p>
<p>
	My mother was looking at something that she wanted online today, and it was sold out.
	It got me thinking.
	Things that she wants are often either sold out or expensive.
	She herself even says that she has expensive tastes.
	The problem is that her tastes are so popular, that people are able to charge more, and if they don&apos;t, none of the object in question are left for her to buy.
	Maybe this is just a symptom of how extreme of a conformist she is though.
	She is against rocking the boat or doing anything that could be remotely perceived as strange.
	Maybe she is exceeding generic at her core.
	I suppose there&apos;s nothing inherently wrong with being generic, as long as you aren&apos;t trying to pressure everyone else into being generic with you, as she does.
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